The Undertaker's Daughter
by Shadowrose89
Summary: After Christine leaves, Erik attempts to kill himself with morphine. Instead, he goes into a coma and is mistaken for dead. Mainly Leroux based.
1. Chapter 1

The figure lying before her was grotesque in appearance. His face was covered by thin waxy skin stretched taught over the bone. The eyes were sunken in, the nose was absent. This image would have been frightening to most, but Aimee was quite used to the dead. She knew them to be silent and harmless, and she put no stock in stories of ghosts or living corpses. Furthermore, the dead provided a ready opportunity to her. Through them she could learn about what truly interested her, the living.

Aimee Bernard had always lived here, in this gloomy house on the outskirts of Paris. Her father was the resident undertaker, a job that never left him in want of work. The overpopulated city with its graveyards already stuffed to the point of bursting, often sent their dead out to the little surrounding towns. Pierre Bernard could be seen driving his little black hearse into and out of Paris nearly every day.

The Bernard morgue was a peculiarity in that it was surrounded by a mostly empty graveyard. Those wealthy enough to afford it had their loved ones interred in consecrated ground. In these cases, Bernard performed the typical embalming process and carried the loaded coffin to a nearby church were a funeral could be held. Many of the dead, however, either had no loved ones to speak of or were too poor to afford this treatment. Thus it was left to the undertaker to bury them in the unblessed earth of his own humble cemetery. Bernard, however, had long ago discovered that doing so was a terrible waste of a valuable commodity. Instead, he had an arrangement with several Parisian medical schools, who would pay him a good price for any fresh corpse he could provide them. And so, Pierre Bernard could be seen driving his little black hearse into and out of Paris nearly every night as well.

Aimee for her part had been greatly influenced by her father's doctor friends. She found herself inspired by the constant presence of death to dedicate her life to preserving life. In short, it became her ambition to become a doctor. Pierre, who desired nothing more than for his daughter to be satisfied, had attempted to persuade his business associates to allow his daughter to attend their prestigious institutions. Although she was quite intelligent, as a woman she was never permitted more than to sit in on lectures. The first hand experience of working on cadavers was always denied.

So Aimee began to teach herself. Her father provided her every so often with an extra corpse, and she set about learning her anatomy first hand with the aid of the college tomes and lecture notes. These texts were now spread on the counter beside the gurney holding her father's latest gift, only the third cadaver she had ever been given to dissect. This emaciated fellow had come straight from the opera house where he had been found dead in the basement. Supposedly, he was the Opera's resident ghost, a man who had conned the managers out of many thousands of francs. "Well you certainly look like a ghoul now," Aimee mused as she reflected on what she knew of the now dead man's rather ironic life.

She looked over her notes and decided to begin with the heart. The four chambered structure was drawn in some detail on the page, but Aimee knew that the drawing would not compare with the real thing. After the brain, this small unassuming muscle was the most vital organ: should it fail, the entire body will follow in a matter of seconds. She gently undid the buttons of the fine white shirt the body wore, slipped it off him with little difficulty, then folded it and set it aside. The pale chest was ribboned by blue veins. She consulted her notes again as she grasped her scalpel. The blade rested for a moment on the surface, before digging dispassionately into the lifeless flesh.


	2. Chapter 2

Erik awoke to a rather acute pain in his chest, a pain which told him that he was not, as he had hoped, dead… not yet at any rate. He opened his eyes groggily as the pain spread to reach every crevice of his loathsome body. The mind numbing effects of the morphine had clearly worn off. He tried to focus on the figure above him. For a moment he thought it was Christine. _Of course it's not Christine idiot! Do you not remember? Christine is gone forever. You frightened her away! She took her boy and left you to die and it is more than you deserve! _Erik grabbed the wrist that floated above his chest.

Aimee thought she felt her heart stop as it happened. The body lifted its hand and grabbed her own in a grip like a vice. The scalpel fell, clattering to the floor. She looked into the yellow eyes that stared up at her with all the intensity of a living man, but from the sunken sockets of a long dead corpse. Shocked, she let out a resounding scream. The dead thing groaned, but did not release her. "Angel of Mercy," it whispered in a voice strangely beautiful but heart-wrenchingly sad, "Kill me. Please have mercy and end my miserable life." The grip on her wrist loosened. Aimee yanked her hand out of the thing's icy clutch, and bolted.

Aimee ran to the graveyard and settled finally breathless in a patch of trees. She watched her house intently to see if it was coming after her_. What was it? Was it a ghost or demon or vampire? Was she sleeping? Was she hallucinating?_ Aimee reminded herself that she did not believe in ghost stories or the like, that she was a logical person. She was also convinced of what she had seen and that it was real. Therefore, there was a living person in her home, who looked dead.

She realized that he must have been in a coma, his blood pressure so lowered and breathing so shallow that he appeared dead. He would have appeared dead regardless, she realized, and wondered what could have caused his disfigurement. Although she could accept it as the face of a dead man it was impossible to accept it moving, showing expression, the idea was morbidly disturbing, and yet she had seen it. She had seen his twisted mouth form the words issued in such a beautiful and pathetic tone. The angelic voice had only added to the wrongness of the experience. Once again Aimee wondered if what she had seen was real.

The girl fought her cowardly reluctance to once again witness the object of her fear, for if she did not return how would she know that she had not imagined it? The girl approached the house again, slowly, but with determination. She entered, and walked down the stairs to the morgue with ever increasing anxiety.

He was exactly where she had left him, lying on the rough wooden table which served as her gurney. His hands no longer rested y his sides, but were crossed over his chest, in a funeral pose. His eyes were closed. "Are you alive?" she whispered.

"I am." The voice was full of disgust, "Doesn't it seem wrong to you that I should be alive – looking for all the world as though I am dead?"

_Yes_. She thought, but could not bring herself to answer.

"But you can set the world straight Mademoiselle," He turned to look at her. "I am close to death. Very close. End my pain. It would be no sin to kill me, but an act of mercy. Allowing me to live would be a grave disservice to me, and to the rest of the world. I beg of you, and I seldom beg. Let me die."

When Aimee was very young, before her father had taken up preemptive grave robbing, they had had chickens for a while. Aimee had a vivid memory of the first time they had eggs to hatch, instead of for breakfast. Her father had explained to her how little chicks would come out of their shells ready to begin their new lives. Generally surrounded by the dead, the child had been fascinated with this creation of new life. Aimee had listened to them cheep sweetly from within their eggs and got to watch as the first chick nibbled its way out. As the hour passed several more followed. Some eggs made no noise, and Aimee, though only four or five, knew that they were dead. One egg was still cheeping, but the small hole that had been formed had not grown at all. Concerned that the chick was somehow stuck, Aimee gently broke away a little more of the shell for it, and a little more, until she held in her hands a sweetly cheeping little chick. Something was wrong with it though. Its legs were curled up and motionless, and its entire body was too small. It couldn't seem to pick its head up but continued to boldly announce its life to the world. Worried, Aimee hurried to take the chick to her father, convinced he could make it all better.

Her father had taken the chick and broke its little neck. He tried to gently explain to the child that the chick could not have lived, and that it was merciful to kill it, but Aimee would not listen. She was horrified and ran to the woods to cry. Her father let her be, deciding that sooner or later she would have to understand such harsh realities, but she never did. Aimee continued to wish that she could have somehow saved the chick.

Aimee surveyed the broken man before her. He was begging her for that kind of mercy, the kind her father had shown that little bird. She wondered if his life could really be so terrible that he would be better off dead. She had no doubt that life had been difficult for him, grotesquely disfigured as he was. However, Aimee knew she could not kill him. Ending a life went against everything she was and everything she hoped to be. Aimee wanted to save lives, not end them.

"No Monsieur, I will neither kill you nor allow you to die," Aimee finally announced, but the living corpse made no reply. He had once again fallen into oblivion and Aimee knew time was short if she was to save him as she had vowed.


End file.
